DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF A TENSEGRITY ROBOT

Abstract

The curiosity of the human mind has led to many wonderful discoveries and inventions. This natural curiosity has led us to explore space to find and learn more about our place in the universe. Space has always been a puzzling subject and hence as human nature is, it is often an inquisitive topic for us. Since achieving spaceflight, we have been able to produce societal benefits that improve the quality of life on earth, ranging from solar panels to implantable heart monitors, from cancer therapy to light‐ weight materials, and from water‐purification systems to improved computing systems and to global search‐and‐rescue systems. It will continue to be an essential driver in opening up avenues in science and technology with more research and development in every sector. Experience has demonstrated that, as long as humankind addresses the challenges of exploring mankind’s common frontier of space, many tangible societal benefits are produced, and in addition to those most commonly anticipated, a great variety of valuable innovations are generated coincidentally, for this is the nature of discovery. Pakistan has not contributed to space exploration in a long time, and we felt that it is the right time for young engineers of a developing country to take a step in this direction and quite frankly, this is the right challenge for us as engineers about to enter our fields. With the current space research focused on tensegrity robots: structures that maintain a stable volume in space through the use of discontinuous compressive elements (struts) connected to a continuous network of tensile elements, the extracted data and results look promising enough to replace rovers with tensegrity robots for planet exploration in the future We have worked on the design and analysis of a six-strut tensegrity robot making use of morphological computation for actuation. The robot has been designed for Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Its unique morphology allows it to withstand the huge impact loads without the need for airbags or similar landing accessories, and the actuation is made possible through utilizing morphological computation which significantly reduces the computational power needed.